Community Events

Violinist Terrie Baune performs Libby Larsen’s “Dancing Man Rhapsody” in the Diablo Symphony’s “American Dance” concert on February 9, 2025, at 2:00 p.m. at the Lesher Center for the Arts. Celebrating the incredible variety of dance music composed and performed in the United States during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the program also features orchestral works by American composer Florence Price and Russian émigré Sergei Rachmaninov. Price originally composed her Suite of Dances in 1933 as a set of piano pieces, and arranged if for wind band in 1939, with the subtitles “Hoe Cake,” Rabbit Foot,” and “Ticklin’ Toes.” She reset the dances as a suite for symphony orchestra in 1951. Reflecting Price’s African American heritage, the last of the three movements evokes a juba, a fast-paced dance with “body percussion” performed on plantations by slaves. Larsen’s “Dancing Man Rhapsody” was described by the composer as a “cornucopia of music and motion” conveying the image of a “guy dancing his way through the world—doing a conga and a stroll.” The commissioned work was written for violinist Baune and premiered by the Eureka Symphony in 2016. Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, written originally for two pianos and titled “Fantastic Dances,” echoes the homeland he fled in 1917. The work, however (with its prominent use of the alto saxophone, an instrument more often heard in American jazz orchestras), been described as “sounding more ‘American’ than anything else [Rachmaninov] composed.”  Completed in 1940, Symphonic Dances was dedicated to the Philadelphia Orchestra and its conductor Eugene Ormandy. It was premiered by that orchestra in January 1941.

For more information or to purchase tickets, visit the DSO’s website at www.diablosymphony.org or call the Lesher Center for the Arts box office (925-943-7469; 1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek—open Wednesday–Sunday, noon to 6:00 p.m.). Tickets are $45 for adults and $15 for youth 13–17. Children 12 and under are free but need a ticket to have a seat, and a discounted ticket price of $35 is available for groups of 10 or more seniors ages 62 and up. (Ticket prices include all processing fees.) Tickets will also be available at the door.